Word document density and relevance scoring

Previous work addressing the issue of word distribution in documents has shown the importance of word repetitiveness as an indicator of the word content-bearing characteristics. In this paper we propose a simple method using a measure of the tendency of words to repeat within a document to separate the words with similar document frequencies, but different topic discriminating characteristics. We describe the application of the new measure in query-document relevance scoring. Experiments on the TREC Ad Hoc and Spoken Document Retrieval tasks show useful performance improvements.